


A fish pie

by Reformed (GarGoyl)



Series: BringBackHetalia Prompts&One-shots [4]
Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Crack, Humor, M/M, Teen Angst, Teen Romance, mentions of depression, they're both idiots
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-29
Updated: 2020-06-29
Packaged: 2021-03-03 22:07:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 891
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24982816
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GarGoyl/pseuds/Reformed
Summary: Tsvetan has a great idea (one of many)
Relationships: Bulgaria/Romania (Hetalia)
Series: BringBackHetalia Prompts&One-shots [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1399051
Kudos: 13





	A fish pie

Alin was lying across the armchair with a wet tissue on his forehead. He was feeling horrible, _horrible_ , and on top of that Tsvetan had sat on the couch in front of him and, impassible, was again smoking one of those cigarettes without filter his grandpa must have smoked during the war. Nothing is cooler, when you suffer from chronic sinusitis, your nose is stuffed all the time and you breathe at about fifty percent of capacity, that even that fifty percent is smoke instead of air. But it was Tsve’s house, so he couldn’t say anything.

Alin had liked him from the beginning, ever since the brunette boy, thin and with eyes of a light, almost uncertain green had first set foot in their classroom. He spoke Romanian with a slight accent, without mistakes, but in hindsight it would have been better not to speak so well. Like this, Alin might have thought that the stupidities Tsvetan said were a translation error and in fact he meant to say something else entirely.

Bullshit, they were real.

Tsve, even if he did well in school – especially in chemistry, out of which Alin could not comprehend anything – and was very good-looking, always managed to do or say something to successfully counter the positive effect these qualities would have had otherwise. For example, the previous summer he had plastered on his arm an atrocious anchor tattoo like Popeye’s and he’d come to school like that, in a sleeveless t-shirt. He had done stupid stuff before, but this time Alin had really been astonished. Good thing that in the evening his parents had thrown a tantrum and forced him to wipe it off.

“We’d better make a polenta,” his desk-mate suggested, peeling the tissue off his forehead. “ _With fish_ , if we really have to.”

He crumpled the tissue and threw it with an expert move towards the waste bin in the corner of the room. The ball hit the wall with a dull flop and dropped exactly behind the waste bin. Logically.

“I don’t want polenta, I want something new,” the Bulgarian insisted, motioning with the cigarette. “And it took me a lot to find this recipe online!”

Tsve was fascinating in a way difficult to explain.

Alin had fallen in love with him in secret, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t left perplexed every now and then. Like, at least once a day. And of course he couldn’t tell him, he would have been rejected for sure and not with something like ‘Fuck, I like girls’ but most likely with something far more profound and absurd, like for example ‘When I was in your room I saw that you didn’t vacuum well.’ As substantial proof in this regard, when Alin – who didn’t use the vacuum anyway – had needed him, emotionally speaking, Tsve had come up with _this_ grand idea. Or, well, this had happened.

About an hour earlier, Tsve had brusquely shown up in a completely wrong moment, when Alin was half-bent over the railing of the suspended pontoon, absently watching the weeds below under the green-brownish water. It wasn’t too deep there, but since he couldn’t swim, he would have drowned anyway. It had been a while since he’d had such ideas, but his parents had fought tooth and nail again for something completely irrelevant around six in the morning, so the day had started well.

Alin was a mess and most likely looked like it too when Tsvetan had shown up out of nowhere and had climbed the pontoon excitedly, as if he were in somewhere in Venice and not on that graffiti-splattered wreck.

 _Ask me why I’m here_ , Alin had inwardly begged. If he had asked, he’d have told him, he’d have told him everything. Bullshit, Tsve had meticulously lit up a no filter cigarette, since he was out in fresh air, what the hell. _Say something. Anything_. Anything. _I feel like l’m going crazy._

“Listen, do you like fish pie?”

_Not this shit though._

Alin had imagined a bland meat, with maaaaany bones, amidst some hard, crumby and flavorless dough. It probably wasn’t really like that, but in that moment… Besides, he was very picky with food, and for depressed people everything is depressing anyway.

“Well-”

“It’s early, let’s go to my place. My folks aren’t home,” Tsve had said, impassible as always, throwing the butt into the water.

Alin felt like laughing hysterically – this sounded, you know, dangerous and exciting, because Tsve never hit anything from his parents, but the invitation didn’t have actually any dangerous and exciting subtext. Or maybe dangerous it was, because Alin had suffered epic indigestions before.

And he was also stupid and without a single shred of self-esteem, accepting only so he could spend some time with Tsve.

He had never imagined… Okay, he had thought that Tsve’s mother had made a pie or that it was at least bought, but not that Tsve had found a recipe online and was hellbent on trying it. _Together._ There was something essentially dubious about this thing, which seemed also premeditated. Maybe for Bulgarians the fish pie meant something in particular? Hell knew, he was ready to go all the way.

When he had laid eyes on the whole mackerel Tsve had bought from the market and had dumped in the kitchen sink, he’d felt faint.


End file.
